This is me…

Something Changed

I didn’t understand it immediately, but now that I’m ready to sleep, I finally get it. See, tonight I colored several old sketch cards. I finally busted out the markers again after an extremely long hiatus. After I finished, I noticed how much worse I’ve gotten at coloring during that stretch. I did color a few things with watercolor pencils between marker usage, but even that was rare (four-ish times total).

The thing about this realization is that it means I actually used to be fairly good at it! I rarely ever liked how it turned out, and I could get sloppy & botchy at times, but looking back, I could blend & shade quite well. This is such a strange, and strangely exciting, feeling. Through all the shit I’ve been through, and fighting like hell to become something resembling a semi-functional human being (still got a looooooooooong way to go), I’ve never been able to look back and see anything good or worthwhile in the rear-view mirror of my life.

It’s weird, even though I’ve fallen off dramatically, realizing I was decent for awhile… And that whole time, I was hating myself and 90% of my art the entire time I was doing this good work. I still do, and I might always struggle with my total lack of self-confidence. But this made me realize, I got to ease up on myself a little bit. I’m never quite going to be normal or be able to work a regular job for any length of time or whatever, but that isn’t the end of the world. I can always do better at life, but I need to chill the hell out a little bit.

I didn’t get good at coloring sketch cards, or keep at it long enough/frequently enough to, because I was so hard on myself. If anything, hating and feeling like a failure made it harder to do. So yeah, this probably isn’t the first weird little realization I’ve had like this, and who knows if it will stick, but I guess it says a something positive that I even noticed it, and extrapolated something good that I can potentially use going forward, from an actual failing.

Beats kicking myself for failings nobody else will ever even notice or care about, assuming they’re failings that even exist at all.